Reviews: The gulf that divides Islam from the West

The appalling consequences of the military technology deployed in the
Gulf War 12 months ago provide a tragic symbol of the encounter between
East and West during the past five centuries: superior military technology
has allowed Western nations to impose their will across the globe, inducing
a prolonged crisis of culture among the losers. Nowhere has this crisis
been more intense than in the Islamic world, where military success had
often been regarded as an outward and visible sign of divine favour after
the Arab armies began to overwhelm their complacent neighbours in the seventh
century.

As a physicist whose career is divided between universities in Pakistan
and the US, Pervez Hoodbhoy’s personal experiences have given him a unique
insight into a number of urgent questions at the very heart of this crisis.
Although he insists that he lacks any professional competence to address
the issues he raises in the book, he maintains that force of circumstance
has compelled him to write. The appendix confirms that he has found himself
engaged in a controversy with proponents of a so-called ‘Islamic science’
which he regards as similar to Christian ‘Creationism’. His book is an attempt
to explain how a hybrid of science and religious fundamentalism could have
received the patronage of President Zia of Pakistan, and to suggest a course
for the future which might prevent his fellow Muslims consigning themselves
to a scientific ghetto.

The cover of the book displays an enthusiastic note from Edward Said,
who claims that ‘any reader, Muslim or non-Muslim, is bound to be affected
by Dr Hood-bhoy’s clear and persuasive arguments’, but the circumstances
described above will almost certainly reduce the impact the book might have
had. Although the title seems to promise a general study of Islam and science,
when Hoodbhoy discusses contemporary issues he rarely moves beyond Pakistan.
Given the varied cir-cumstances of life throughout the Islamic world, even
readers with a special interest in Pakistan are likely to find such a narrow
focus frustrating.

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At the same time, his hopes of providing answers to historical questions
lead him into precisely the sort of areas he admits are outside his training.
The account of the ways in which the medieval Christian church attempted
to suppress early scientists, which Abdus Salam in his preface regards as
particularly impressive, consists of little more than a list of ten examples
drawn from A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology published almost
a century ago. Additional comments made by the author himself indicate virtually
no knowledge of the structure of medieval European society, or of the relationship
between sacred and secular learning, and include a condemnation which even
readers who are not anxious to return to the Middle Ages may regard as rather
extreme: ‘the suppression of scientific thought by the medieval Church represents
one of the blackest periods of human history’.

This description is in marked contrast with Hoodbhoy’s account of the
French Revolution as ‘a landmark victory for the intellectual and physical
liberation of the French people’. Throughout the book, one encounters simplistic
dichotomies between what the author regards as reason and superstition,
and these raise serious questions about the sort of reader he has in mind.
Hoodbhoy is evidently a ‘modernist’ of the old school, and his account of
the nature of science and the scientific method might almost have be taken
from a textbook for elementary schools 40 years ago.

While he will have been very provoked by ‘Islamic scientists’ who seem
to believe that celestial beings mentioned in the Quran can be used to solve
Pakistan’s energy problem, his frustration has led him to adopt a stance
which will seem anachronistic or reactionary to general readers who are
now familiar with books attempting to lead them through the strange worlds
of chaos theory or artificial intelligence.

Given Hoodbhoy’s own modesty, it may seem unfair to press the point,
but if the general reader will not be convinced by his arguments, who will
be? Specialists in the history of Islamic science will learn nothing from
his chapters on the subject. He does not seem to be familiar with research
which might have strengthened his own arguments, and of all the publications
by dozens of specialist historians, only a single article by A. I. Sabra
is cited, and then only in support of the obvious point that Nestorian Christians
played a major role in translating Greek texts into Arabic.

Conservative Muslims who might be attracted to the ‘Islamic science’
which so worries Hoodbhoy are also unlikely to be convinced, since he finds
it difficult to answer the basic questions at the centre of the dispute.
At times he seems to regard science as morally neutral, but at other times
as morally positive because its very neutrality means that it is part of
the process of enlightenment.

He also maintains that Western science is more than simply Western,
because it is universal, but this is precisely the claim which conservatives
have made a point of rejecting: they do not see a tradition so obviously
tied to the history of the West as a system of objective, neutral or universal
truth. Indeed, even if the claims for neutrality were justified, the lack
of moral commitment this neutrality implies would itself be seen as contrary
to Islam.

No account of the glories of early Chinese, Indian or Islamic science
is likely to remove conservative anxiety, and in the end the question would
not seem to be about the kind of science which is compatible with Islam,
but rather about the kind of Islam which is compatible with science. The
Islam in which Hoodbhoy maintains that science can flourish is almost certainly
not the kind of Islam his opponents would like to see.

This means that the argument is likely to be decided according to the
rules of theology rather than the history of science, and Hoodbhoy may have
had more justification than he realised when he claimed that the debate
lay outside his competence. Nevertheless, his modesty and sincerity make
his courage in addressing issues avoided by many specialists all the more
admirable. Even if his arguments might have been refined, there is much
in the book that needed to be said, and much that can be read with profit,
especially about science education in Pakistan. I hope he will return to
the subject.

It is with this in mind that Hoodbhoy provides a useful critique of
attempts by other authors to discuss Islamic science as if the realities
of modern life simply did not exist, and Muslims could wish themselves back
to the numinous realms of the medieval alchemists. This is a very serious
question for anyone attempting to revive the glories of earlier centuries,
and although Hoodbhoy may risk making the same mistake himself when he recruits
Ibn Sina or al-Razi to prove that ‘the seeds of modernism’ can be detected
among famous Muslim scientists a thousand years ago, it is an area in which
conservative Muslims, Christians, Hindus or anyone else ought to take great
care.

In addition, his arguments are often confusing: to support claims for
the ‘oneness’ of mankind, he provides a brief account of the linguist Noam
Chomsky’s theories of a ‘language acquisition device’, although even if
this could be demonstrated to exist, it is difficult to see why it would
prove that ‘human thought and behaviour are entirely universal’ and that
the development of science in Europe was therefore ‘utterly accidental’.
Furthermore, while Hoodbhoy seems to think the point is essential to his
hopes of encouraging contemporary Muslims to study science, his lengthy
accounts of why the scientific and technological revolution occurred in
Europe rather than the Islamic world suggest that he does not really believe
it anyway.

Roderick Grierson is a Syriac specialist, director of the forthcoming
Islamic science exhibition The House of Wisdom, and founder of the history
of science section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.